Charlie Brooker has come a long way since the early days of Screenwipe, the sardonic BBC news review he began in 2006, in which he interrogated the inanities of modern life via wittily-curated footage from EastEnders and Celebrity Big Brother.
But the world has changed, too. And 15 years later, watching Screenwipe’s direct descendant, Death to 2021, the truncheon-across-the-cranium brand of humour for which Brooker is celebrated is starting to seem past its sell-by date.
Death to 2021 – which Brooker didn’t write himself, and in which his direct involvement extends only to “executive-producing” – is blunt-force satire. It arrives at a moment when the last thing audiences need is another angry know-it-all yelling at the top of their lungs. But absence of subtlety is all Netflix’s 60-minute film has to offer, as the likes of Hugh Grant, Tracey Ullman and The West Wing’s Stockard Channing deliver textureless pastiches of archetypes that were, already, generally beyond parody.
Grant, for instance, plays “Tennyson Foss”, a reactionary historian who refuses to do the “wokey-cokey”, and argues that Bridgerton was a hate crime against white men. And Ullman is a Fox News-style American news anchor who tells her viewers that Covid is a liberal conspiracy (while sneakily taking the vaccine). It’s not quite Orwell.
These sketches are interspersed with news footage from January’s riots at the US Capitol in Washington DC, billionaire Jeff Bezos zipping into space in his phallic rocket, and global anti-lockdown protests. The narration is, like last year, by Laurence Fishburne, whose booming tone strips the last subtlety from a script that was critically deficient in nuance to begin with.
Brooker has, in the last half-decade, become Netflix’s resident dystopian seer, having brought Black Mirror to the streaming service after early success with Channel 4. That series forced us to confront uncomfortable truths about how technology has changed our lives; its power lay in how it showed us facets of the modern world that are horribly obvious, yet to which we all somehow act oblivious.
